Localization is directed towards the concept of adapting an application program to a particular culture. In many situations, teams of translators spend significant time figuring out what changes need to be made to a program, typically to the program's user interface. The most common example of changing a user interface is translating text from one language to another, however other types of adaptations need to be made. For example, a color scheme that may be fine in one culture may not be appropriate for another. Other types of changes also need to be made.
Operating systems and components allow user interfaces to be built with hierarchically-arranged data, particularly via XML (extensible markup language) files, and in Microsoft Corporation's XAML (extensible application markup language). As each such file changes over the development life of a project, there is a need to identify the changes that are made to the file. For example, the above-described localization of a project is a long process that needs to happen in parallel with project development, and thus begins long before the project is complete. As changes are made, synchronization is necessary to track every change to the un-localized files, so that the change will be reflected in the corresponding versions of the localized files. While existing text-based difference programs provide some assistance to the translation teams, this does not work sufficiently well enough in many situations. For example, if a sequence of (e.g., XML) tagged objects in the un-localized XML is changed such that both the content (e.g., text or color) and the ordering and/or number of objects is changed (e.g., buttons are reordered, removed or added), then contemporary difference program only detect that the whole sequence has changed, causing the entire sequence to require re-localization, which is a very expensive process.
What is needed is a way to track changes to data files so that a reduced amount of re-localization is required. Complex change edits, such as changes made to both the content and the ordering/number of a sequence of tags, should not require that the entire sequence be re-localized.